CTR Giving Opportunities

"There is no greater engine for evolution in the world than groundbreaking ideas. CTR brings together the best leading edge thinkers to accelerate our collective evolution by literally dreaming a new world into being."

—Stephen Dinan CEO, The Shift Network, author of Radical Spirit, and former CTR staff member

Directed by Esalen Cofounder Michael Murphy and Professor Jeff Kripal, Esalen’s Center for Theory & Research (CTR) Esalen’s Center for Theory & Research (CTR) sponsors research, theory and action to promote positive social change and the realization of the human potential. Underwriting is needed for project research, facilitators, translators, coordinators, summary writers, occasional expert fees, travel and accommodations, and special outreach projects. Please see the list of our current projects below and please note the following.

Supporters at the $10,000 + level are invited to attend a CTR Conference of their choice, as long as donor seats are still available for the chosen conference. Housing arrangements must be made and paid for separately.

Led by Patrick Holden CBE, head of the Sustainable Food Trust and co-led by author and journalist Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation, Command and Control) this conference will gather the most influential and highly conscious leaders in the field of food systems transition in a moon-shot move to make a real difference in the transition to organic food systems around the world.

The Super Story Symposia Series
November 25-30, 2018
Facilitator: Jeff Kripal

This symposium will focus on the convergence (and divergence) of modern evolutionary thinking and the concept of deification, both human and cosmic, in the history of philosophy and religion. We will attend especially to the esoteric evolutionary threads that have emerged over the last century and a half (Esalen being one of them). We will put these threads into conversation with a nuanced history of incarnation and deification in philosophy and religion, ancient and modern. We will consider such questions as the place of teleology in evolutionary thinking; what sorts of latent or manifest doctrines of deification are at work in the philosophical and religious histories that inform our present, and how do these interact with scientific discourses of evolution; what options there are for bridging the discourses of evolution and deification (e.g. evolutionary panentheism, panpsychism, the study of consciousness); what are the obstacles, real or imagined, to building such bridges; and how does or should popular culture contribute to these efforts.

Our last conference of 2018 will address our IAN initiative in 2019 and will take our North Pacific Rim Project to its next level. Both these efforts are currently under development and agendas and participant selection will be established later in the year. The 2019 IAN conference will bring together a group of 25 to 30 influential peace-builders and practitioners of various human potential practices to help leaders develop their work in the Middle East.

We will also firm up plans for a 2019 NPRP conference and discuss participation, topics, and how we create a more permanent discussion using the Internet and mobile technologies to do so.